The flowers, fetishism, felines, and females of Nobuyoshi Araki

Born in 1940, Nobuyoshi Araki has published an astonishing 400 books of his quietly arresting photography (many of them self-published photocopied editions). Within that prolific output, Araki has focused his lens on a limited number of subjects: flowers, street scenes of his native Tokyo, nudes, and the Japanese art of kinbaku, a form of rope bondage. For his entire career, Araki has pushed against Japan’s strict censorship laws (while acknowledging that it’s “better for me to have some rules”).

Araki by Araki is a massively thick book that bares the soul of an artist who has no agenda other than to share his eclectic obsessions. As he states in the interview that runs in the book, “I don’t have anything to say. There is no special message in my photos.” – Mark Frauenfelder